Page 165 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

Sumiko’s grandmother balked at the wetsuit, too. Disrespectful, said Sumiko’s

grandmother, to go to the ocean like that. You don't see whales going around like that.

Like demons, umi bōzu — glossy, black, humanoid giants who thrashed the sea into

deadly typhoons. Plus, you're more likely to snag something and get stuck. Then you'd

drown. Wouldn't happen if you dressed the way your mother made you.

Yet it was Sumiko's grandmother — while her daughter-in-law, Sumiko's mother, roared

with laughter — who was the first Nagata ama to wear clothes into the water. Skirt and

blouse, pearl-white, they'd go down in history as the "traditional" costume of Japanese

ama. These outfits, amagi, offered little warmth, flailed in the water, and were designed

in the twentieth century by the Mikimoto Pearl Company in Toba.

World Wars brought an end to migrant work. In each village, a sea tenure system

enforced by a local co-op granted fishing rights only to residents. Sumiko's village,

Kaiyono, was a ward of Toba. Her grandmother worked part-time for the pioneer of

cultured pearls, diving up oysters, taking them back down after someone in the factory

slipped tiny irritants into their shells. The pearls were world-famous, as were Mikimoto's

ama. But the sight of their thick, brown, naked bodies appalled the factory's non-

Japanese visitors.

Sumiko was a senior citizen when she got her first amagi, handmade by a friend in the

Ama Preservation Association. She never dived in it, only wore it to her night job.

Neither she nor her mother, her great-great-grandmother, nor any of their friends ever